~A Vitality Spent in the Dust~
The Valley of Ashes, the smoldering and grungy home of both Myrtle and George Wilson, is a vast counter to the glistening and trimmed beauty of both East and West Egg. The ashes and dust that gather in heaps from industrial work surround the area, burying it in its warm message. Already with its introduction it grows contrary a "fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys..." (23), where the "wheat" and "houses" all meld to create to form a connotation of cozy, comfortable, and productive life, when ashes in contrast are the razed remains of the above. Therefore, Fitzgerald indicates that the Valley of the Ashes is growing, but not in any regard in a lively and healthy manner. Myrtle, a women languishing in the Valley except for her adulterous times with Tom Buchanan, is the only person exempt from the white ashes that swirl quietly around everyone else (26). The ashes are described as "veiled", as if all the people wrapped in it a married in some way to it, as if they are intricately bonded with it. This union of dust and character portrays how everyone (sans Myrtle) is bonded to the ashes, reminiscent of the burnt-up remainders of life and vigor itself (more accurately, how nearly every character has something about them that has been consumed in some way). Considering the purposeless life that Tom, Daisy, and Jordan experience due to the vast wealth to their names, this wealth gets in the way of finding direction, and the ashes nod to cremation and death implies that the obstinate, dedicated part of their lives is void and dead.
Ashes and dust's additional association with death and endings acts as foreshadowing to what lays ahead for the residents there. Notable are the cases of Myrtle, who "mingled her thick dark blood with the dust" (137), and Wilson, who approached Gatsby "like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him" (161), killed Gatsby, and turned the gun on himself, thus making sure that "the holocaust was complete" (162). Ashes, however, do not just foretell the death of an individual, but what they stand for and what they dream of. The death of the dream, whether American or not, is evidenced when Gatsby, leading Nick through his home, noticed an "inexplicable amount of dust everywhere" (147-148), the residue of his dead dream of Daisy (who left him once more) after the fatal strike at Myrtle. Myrtle's dream of ascending her social status and class by her affair with Tom also falls to the roar of an engine, with the aforementioned "blood with the dust", life and hope with terminal carelessness. Ultimately, the ashes falling as snow in the Valley signal a transition similar to winter; changes are coming, with great vitality, life, and dream submerging, deathly silent, into dust instead of frost.